Resource information
Despite global gender equality gains in
education, life expectancy, and labor force participation,
two areas of persistent inequality remain: asset gaps and
women's agency. In many developing countries, including
Papua New Guinea (PNG), land and natural resources are
citizens' key assets. This briefing note, centered on
field research in north fly district explores the process of
negotiation and the progress in implementation of the
Community Mine Continuation Agreements (CMCAs). The purpose
of the research and the resulting brief is to understand how
the CMCAs came about, assess whether their promise is being
realized in practice, and provide guidance for mining and
gender practitioners looking to use mining agreements to
improve development outcomes for women, both in PNG and
further afield. Revised compensation agreements at the Ok
Tedi mine, called CMCAs, concluded in 2007 are an
encouraging innovation. In these revised CMCAs, women had a
seat at the negotiating table and secured an agreement
giving them 10 percent of all compensation, 50 percent of
all scholarships, cash payments into family bank accounts
(to which many women are cosignatories), and mandated seats
on the governing bodies implementing the agreement
(including future reviews of the agreement). The 2006-07 Ok
Tedi negotiation process and the resulting CMCAs were
internationally groundbreaking for having secured enhanced
rights for women in legally enforceable mining agreements,
even in a context of severe gender inequality. Nevertheless,
the gender asset gaps that persist in the midst of the
current global extractives boom highlight the need to engage
women more proactively in mining agreements and support
their ability to exercise greater agency over those
resources. More attention to the principles and experiences
of community-driven development, together with more local
political economy analysis, will likely benefit women's
engagement and outcomes.
